Canada Feared
Mad Cow Outbreak
Government Agency Quietly Ordered Destruction of Danish Sheep: Documents Political Fallout of Importing Infected Animals 'Is Very High'
The Ottawa Citizen (Front Page)
March 25, 2001
By Mark Kennedy
Canada quietly ordered the destruction last year of sheep imported from Denmark in the early 1990s because they were suspected of being infected with mad cow disease through contaminated feed, the Citizen has learned.
Documents obtained through the Access to Information Act reveal that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) took the action as a precaution to prevent the fatal brain-wasting disease from jumping the species barrier and spreading to other animals and to humans.
Agency officials now say none of the animals tracked down and destroyed was diagnosed as having bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease.
But that doesn't offer a total guarantee. Only 22 of the 111 imported in the early 1990s were found, killed and tested in last year's trace.
Of the remainder: 38 had already died or were slaughtered; 26 were unaccounted for; 24 had been exported to the United States, and the owner of one sheep is still refusing to give up his animal to be destroyed.
A "risk assessment" report prepared by the agency last September drew some stark conclusions.
It found there was a "low" risk that the sheep, imported in four separate shipments in 1992 and 1994, were infected with BSE upon arrival from Denmark.
Furthermore, the report said the risk was "low to moderate" that some of the sheep, once they died, were sent to Canadian rendering plants where their remains were boiled and turned into sawdust-like, protein-rich products to be added to animal feeds. If so, this would create a route through which BSE could be spread to other Canadian livestock.
"The consequences of the identification of a case of BSE in native animals in Canada are likely to be VERY HIGH," the report warned.
"In addition, the political consequences resulting from the fact that, on paper, Canada has imported ruminants from a BSE affected country can also be considered to be HIGH."
There is now strong scientific proof that animals with BSE can transmit a similar strain of the disease, known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) to humans. So far, nearly 100 people in Britain and Europe have been infected with the fatal brain disorder.
The food inspection agency ordered the sheep destroyed once it learned in February 2000 that Denmark had just experienced its first case of a native-born animal (a three-year-old dairy cow) diagnosed with BSE.
An internal CFIA e-mail, sent to the agency's district offices in September after a traceback of the imported animals had occurred, left no room for staff to exercise discretion about whether to let the sheep live.
"These sheep are being ordered destroyed because they are suspected of being affected or contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)," said the e-mail.
Canada's decision to close the borders to more Danish meat imports and destroy those animals already here was a rare event. Indeed, it was only the second time this country has taken such drastic action in connection with mad cow disease. The first occurred in 1993, when a cow previously imported to Canada from Britain developed BSE. It, and the herd in which it resided, was killed.
However, the food inspection agency did not issue a news release last year to inform the public of its action on the imported sheep. Instead, it rounded up as many of the sheep as it could find, paid the owners up to $600 for each animal, destroyed them and sent their brain samples to the agency's lab in Ottawa for analysis.
Dr. Claude Lavigne, director of the agency's animal health and production division, said in an interview there's nothing unusual about the measure not being publicly announced.
"It was considered as something that was routine. There are lots of things that we do every day here that we can't issue a press release every time we do something."
But questions still remain about why the agency, which has been accused by critics of being overly secretive and too close to industry, didn't announce its measures.
Mr. Lavigne denied suggestions it could be the agency feared -- as its own risk assessment report appeared to suggest -- the "political consequences."
He said the use of that phrase was "unfortunate" and that a better choice of words probably would have been "trade consequences."
"Some countries that we export to scrutinize our programs here. They ask us for all kinds of information. They send us questionnaires and we answer these questions as openly as we can. Some countries may have taken the negative thing, that we imported ruminants from BSE infected countries."
"To me, these are trade consequences," said Mr. Lavigne. "These risk-assessing people are scientists and sometimes they don't measure the weight of some of their words."
Mr. Lavigne stressed that there have been no cases of BSE found in Canadian livestock since the 1993 incident involving the U.K.-imported cow.
Still, the risk assessment report contains some troubling findings:
- There has never been a documented case of a sheep "naturally" contracting BSE in an environment such as a farm. However, it has been scientifically proven in laboratories, where sheep are deliberately infected with the BSE agent, that the disease can jump the species barrier between cows and sheep.
- There was a "likelihood" that the sheep imported to Canada had been fed protein-enriched feeds in Denmark containing the rendered remains of other ruminant animals, such as cows. It was this practice of recycling the remains of dead animals that is now blamed for the spread of mad cow disease in Britain and Europe.
- After the sheep arrived in Canada, there is no way of knowing if any of them were also sent to Canadian rendering plants once they died. In 1997, Canada placed a ban on the use of rendered remains from ruminants, such as cows and sheep, for animal feed. But by then, the imported animals would have ranged in age from four to nine years. The industry had put a voluntary ban in place in 1991 on using sheep offal or carcasses for rendered products, but the report said "we have no information on compliance with the ban."
Usually, sheep are more closely linked to another disease, called scrapie, which is a strain of a collection of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). Unlike mad cow disease, or BSE, there is no evidence yet that scrapie is transmissible to humans. Still, governments don't take a chance it will spread to other sheep, or that it could cross the species barrier. Last week, it was revealed 1,200 sheep have been destroyed on southern Manitoba farms in the past several months as a precaution against scrapie.
All the while, the bigger threat remains BSE. It is believed that the nearly 100 people with the human form, vCJD, caught it by eating contaminated beef or beef byproducts.
For years, it was thought Britain would be the hardest hit. But within the past few months, other countries in Europe have experienced their first cases of BSE, which has an incubation period, it is believed, of four to seven years.
Health experts are now waiting for humans in those countries to begin showing symptoms of vCJD. Scientists believe it takes 10 to 20 years, perhaps even longer, for that disease to incubate in people.
As well, the World Health Organization is warning countries that the disease might one day become a global epidemic. That's because Britain exported its contaminated bovine meat and bone meal until 1996 to Europe, and the products were either re-exported directly, or repacked and sent abroad to as many as 80 countries.
Canada says it did not import any of those beef products from Britain, although critics point to U.K. export data that, though imprecise, raise questions on the issue.